The Universe wants to play with you (part 16)

A coincidence (often stated as a mere coincidence) is a collection of two or more events or conditions, closely related by time, space, form, or other associations which appear unlikely to bear a relationship as either cause to effect or effects of a shared cause, within the observer's or observers' understanding of what cause can produce what effects.

3pm
Meanwhile, 11,850.82 miles away, Corrado Fenn was disturbed and while he'd been accused of this a number of times, including twice by high court judges, this time it was him who felt it.

He'd just seen a man looking at him from out of his bedroom wall.  A man wearing a security guard's uniform, who slowly faded away. 

A man who had a look of shock on his face. 

That didn't disturb him as much as the fact he was lying on the bed having a wank at the time. The loss of dignity was deep, even when the man disappeared; there also a deflationary effect.

Strange appearances, peculiar happenings, impossible coincidences and every other odd thing in between was just in a day's work for Fenn. As befits the author of such 'popular' books as 'Come to the stars with me or at least to my camper van' and 'If you think I’m weird, just look at my reflection', weirdness had been his constant companion since he was three or four.

From the séances his parents hosted,  to the little people on his bed, from his father reading 'The Book of law' to him when he was 12, to his mother taking him to the sky watches at Warminster when he was 14, his warped understanding of reality had turned him into the man he was today; 61, living on his own in a small house in Walthamstow, East London, a pariah to most of society but a reluctant prophet and a guru to a small minority.

This was despite him adhering to the late John Keel's mantra of  I'm 'not an authority on anything' and refusing to accept the view that UFOs are evidence of extra-terrestrial craft and beings. Over the years, he'd managed to antagonise plenty of people in the Fortean arena, not all of them deliberately, ever since his first UFO conference in the early 1970s, when he'd denounced the platform speakers, and most of the audience, as stuck-up, toff posh bastards.

Earmarked as difficult and contrary from the start, Fenn had only upped his game in the years since by his sheer intransigence, not to mention his ability to produce over 150 issues of a magazine that mixed the world of politics with the world of the strange ; while no-one doubted the effort he put into his research or his basic integrity, his refusal to involve himself in constructing a theory, or more importantly to self-selected groups, supporting their particular theory and his willingness to call an idiot an idiot amongst other epithets had made him vastly unpopular amongst ufonauts, conspiracy nuts, Trotskyists and countless others.

 None of this had prevented him from just about making a living from his writing most of his life with just regular back up forays into freelancing. Apart from the success of his books, the crowning glory or the slap in the face of his enemies, which was far more important, was his lecture series at Birkbeck, now into its second year.

How they roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws, completely ineffectually.

Fenn was already thinking how he could fit the visitation into tonight's lecture; no longer needing to have a shower, Fenn pulled on his clothes and got ready to go out, drinking with the remainder of the UTB before his lecture.